“In 1970, I spent a period of six months in merchant marineas a sailor, on an Esso tanker, and it was on board that ship that I had my first contact with men who had grown up with guns and they continued to live on intimate terms with them. Most of our cargo consisted of jet fuel that we hauled up and down the the Atlantic coast to the Gulf of Mexico. From Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Baytown, Texas, sites of the two largest Esso refineries, started all our voyages, with regular stops in Tampa and other ports of passage. There were only thirty-three men on board, and apart from a couple of Europeans and a handful of Northerners like myself, all the officers and crew members came from the South, almost all from Louisiana and various coastal Texas cities. Two of those sailors come to mind now, not because they were especially my friends, but because, each in his different way, They helped further my training in firearms.
Lamar was a short, shaggy redhead from Baton Rouge, with a smudge of brilliant crimson dotting the white of his left eye and eight letters tattooed on the knuckles of both hands: LOVE and HATE, the same marks etched on Robert’s fingers. Mitchum in his role as a demented preacher in “The Night of the Hunter.” Lamar worked as an oiler’s helper in the engine room and was around my age (twenty-three). Although his bad boy tattoosHe struck me as a pleasant, soft-spoken fellow, and since we had both just landed on our first ship, he assumed we were allies and seemed to enjoy my company when we weren’t busy with our respective tasks. The fact that I was from the North, had a college degree, and had published a few poems in magazines was not something he regarded with suspicion. He accepted me as I was, just as I accepted him, and we got along well; we weren’t friends exactly, just mates who were easygoing and friendly. Then came the first revelation, the first shock. By then we had told each other enough stories about our lives for me to think he wouldn’t mind if he asked about the red spot in his eye. Not offended, Lamar calmly explained to me what happened to him a few years ago when a crowd of which he was a part threw bottles from the sidewalk at a protest march led by Martin Luther King. A glass shard entered his eye, pierced the membrane, causing a lesion that had healed into the ugly red thing that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Still, he could have been much worse, he claimed, and he felt lucky he hadn’t lost his eye.
Until then, Lamar had never said a word against blacks in my presence, and when I asked him why he had participated in this cruel stupidity, he shrugged and said he thought it was funny at the time. He was a teenager and didn’t have much knowledge, hinting that now he wouldn’t do that kind of thing again. Nor could I, of course, given that Martin Luther King had been shot to death two years earlier, but I decided to take his words as an apology, even though I had my doubts. Then came the second revelation. We were on deck one afternoon watching a flock of seagulls circle the ship when Lamar told me about another of the fun things he liked to do on Saturday nights in Baton Rouge when he was bored, which was grab his rifle, Fill your pocket with ammo, stand on an overpass on the interstate and shoot cars. He smiled at the memory while I tried to absorb what he was saying to me. “Shoot the cars,” I finally said, “don’t kid me.” “Not at all,” he replied, “that’s what I did,” and when asked if he was aiming at the drivers, passengers, the gas tank, or the wheels, he vaguely replied that he was shooting in the general direction of the cars. And if he had been right and killed someone, I asked him, what would he have done then? Lamar shrugged again and immediately gave me a laconic, indifferent, almost deadpan reply: “Who knows?”
Those two shocks occurred during my first ten or twelve days on the ship, in the days that followed I kept a respectful and friendly distance from Lamar, and then, one afternoon, he came up to me to say goodbye as we were about to dock. The chief engineer did not like his work, he told me, and they had kicked him out. He had previously told me that he had completed a rigorous training course and that he had passed an exam to work as an oiler, but it turned out that Lamar had cheated on the exam and knew as much about greaser work as I did. As the chief engineer later told me, “That little bastard would have been able to blow up the tanker and every living thing on board, so I kicked his ass and kicked the bastard out of here.”
Goodbye to my lost companion, to the one who was my friend. Not just a bottled-up racist, not just a dangerous fraud, but an empty psychopath for whom it didn’t matter in the least to point his gun at anonymous strangers and shoot them just for the fun of it, for the pleasure it gave him. If you put a gun in the hands of a maniac, anything can happen. We all know that, but when the maniac appears to be an ordinary, balanced individual, with no resentment or obvious grudge against the world, what should we think and how should we act? To my knowledge, no one has ever provided a satisfactory answer to that question.
Billy was a different kind of animal: docile, mild-mannered, and young, only eighteen or nineteen, by far the youngest member of the crew. I was the second youngest, but compared to the hairless blond Billy, I felt vastly older. A nice guy from a small rural town in Louisiana who talked mostly about his passion for hot rods and deer hunting with his father, whom he referred to as “dad” and “my dad.” A couple of times we went ashore together with Martinez, a forty-year-old man from Texas, but aside from liking Billy and promising to go hunting someday when he passed through Louisiana, I never got to know him. None of that matters anymore. Fifty years later, what counts is that at one of our stops in Tampa we disembarked with Martinez, and while the three of us waited for a taxi to pick us up and take us downtown, Billy made a collect call home from the pay phone. from the pier. He talked to his father or his mother for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time, and when he hung up, he turned to us with a concerned expression on his face and said, “My brother’s been arrested. He shot someone in a bar last night and he’s in a holding cell at the county jail.”
He didn’t add anything else. No word as to why she had shot this person by her brother, no word as to whether he had killed her or if she was still alive, and if so whether or not she was seriously injured. Just the essentials: Billy’s brother had shot someone and was now in jail.
With no further elements to consider, I can only conjecture. If his older brother was anything like Billy himself–that is, if he was a good-natured, reasonably level-headed human being who functioned like one, and not a trigger-happy crank like Lamar–they’re all set for the shooting of the The night before was triggered by some argument, perhaps with an old friend, perhaps with a stranger, and that the disinhibiting effects of alcohol also played a decisive role in the story. One too many beer and a verbal dispute that suddenly and unexpectedly erupts into a hand-to-hand fight. These things happen every night in bars, pubs and cafes around the world, but the bloody noses and sore jaws that often follow such fights in Canada, Norway or France often end in gunshot wounds in the United States. Joined. The statistics are both stark and instructive. Americans are twenty-five times more likely to be shot than citizens of other rich, supposedly advanced countries, and, with less than half the population of those two dozen countries combined, eighty-two percent of gun deaths of fire occur here. The difference is so great, so shocking, so disproportionate to what is happening elsewhere, that you have to wonder why. Why is the United States so different, and what makes us the most violent country in the Western world?
Fragment of the book “A country bathed in blood”.
The images of “A country bathed in blood”
“The images that accompany the text of this book are photographs of silence”, explains Paul Auster in a preliminary note to “A country bathed in blood”. With these brief lines he presents the interesting work of his partner, photographer Spencer Ostrander, to illustrate the violence, horror, and chaos that unleashed the major massacres that occurred in the United States. “Over the course of two years, Spencer Ostrander undertook several long trips across the country to photograph the sites of more than thirty mass shootings that have occurred in the last few decades,” Auster continues. The photographs are notable for the absence of human figures and the fact that nowhere is there even the suggestion of a weapon in sight. They are portraits of buildings, bleak, sometimes unsightly constructions set in bland, neutral American landscapes: forgotten structures where men with guns and pistols carried out horrendous massacres, briefly garnering the nation’s attention, then fading into oblivion until Ostrander appeared with his camera and transformed them into tombstones of our collective pain. Ostrander was born in 1984, currently lives in New York and has taken photos for the main magazines in his country.
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